“She lied, but only because she can’t say her real name—one of the vicious little details tucked like nettles in the grass. Hidden barbs designed to sting. What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.”
“They will stay the night in a local inn, and for the first time in her life, Adeline will sleep in a foreign bed, and wake to foreign sounds and smells, and there will be a moment, as brief as a yawn, when she won’t know where she is, and her heart will quicken—first with fear, and then with something else. Something she does not have the words for yet.
And by the time they return home to Villon, she will already be a different version of herself. A room with the windows all thrown wide, eager to let in the fresh air, the sunlight, the spring.”
“Estele’s face darkens. “The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.” She leans over Adeline, casting her in shadow. “And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”
“No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.”
“There was no danger in it, no reproach, not when she was young. All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.”
“Adeline had wanted to be a tree.
To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above, just like Estele. It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself.
But here is the danger of a place like Villon.
Blink—and a year is gone.
Blink—and five more follow.
It is like a gap between stones, this village, just wide enough for things to get lost. The kind of place where time slips and blurs, where a month, a year, a life can go missing. Where everyone is born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.”
“Ah,” says the darkness, reading her silence. “You do not know.” Again, the green eyes shift, darken. “You ask for time without limit. You want freedom without rule. You want to be untethered. You want to live exactly as you please.”
“Now, as she stares up at the mottled dusk, she longs for home. Not for Roger, or the future she did not want, but the woody grip of Estele’s hand on hers as the old woman showed her how to wind raspberry bushes, and the soft hum of her father’s voice as he worked in his shed, the scent of sap and wood dust in the air. The pieces of her life she never meant to lose.”
“Addie has always had a fondness for museums.
Spaces where history gathers out of place, where art is ordered, and artifacts sit on pedestals, or hang on walls above little white didactics.”
“Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself.”
“A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.”
“Palimpsest.
She doesn’t know the word just yet, but fifty years from now, in a Paris salon, she will hear it for the first time, the idea of the past blotted out, written over by the present, and think of this moment in Le Mans.
A place she knows, and yet doesn’t.”
“The food, the art, the constant offerings of culture—though Addie’s favorite thing is its scale. Towns and villages are easily conquered. A week in Villon was enough to walk every path, to learn every face. But with cities like Paris, London, Chicago, New York, she doesn’t have to pace herself, doesn’t have to take small bites to make the newness last. A city she can consume as hungrily as she likes, devour it every day and never run out of things to eat.”
“Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods.
If no one heard it, did it happen?
If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?”
“For months, she will keep reaching for the bird, hand drifting to her pocket the way it might to a stubborn curl, a motion born of so much habit. She cannot seem to remind her fingers it is gone, cannot seem to remind her heart, which stutters a little every time she finds the pocket empty. But, there, blooming amid the sorrow, is a terrible relief. Every moment since she left Villon, she has feared the loss of this last token.
Now that it is gone, there is a guilty gladness tucked among the grief.
This last, brittle thread to her old life has broken, and Addie has been set well, and truly, and forcibly free.”
“Aut viam invenium aut faciam”
“To find a way, or make your own.”
“Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
“But this is how you walk to the end of the world.
This is how you live forever.
Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone.
So she says yes.”
“Mischief glints in those green eyes. “I think you’ll find my word won’t fade as fast as yours.” He shrugs. “They will not remember you, of course. But ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root.”
It will be fifty years before she realizes that he is right.
Ideas are wilder than memories.
And she can plant them, too.”
“Blink, and you’re twenty-six, and you’re called into the dean’s office because he can tell that your heart’s not in it anymore, and he advises you to find another path, and he assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.
Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”
“Addie softens, takes his hand. “Of course it does. Your deal and mine, they nest like Russian dolls together in a shell. I look at you, and I see exactly what I want. It’s just that what I want has nothing to do with looks, or charm, or success. It would sound awful, in another life, but what I want most—what I need—has nothing to do with you at all. What I want, what I’ve always truly wanted, is for someone to remember me. That’s why you can say my name. That’s why you can go away, and come back, and still know who I am. And that’s why I can look at you, and see you as you are. And it is enough. It will always be enough.”
“It feels good to be the user instead of the used.
To be the one who gets instead of the one who loses.
It feels good. It shouldn’t, he knows, but it does.”
“She stares out at the expanse, the coastline giving way to water, and water giving way to sky. She has seen maps of course, but ink and paper hold nothing to this. To the salt smell, the murmur of waves, the hypnotic draw of the tide. To the scope and scale of the sea, and the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the horizon, there is more.”
“It’s like living with déjà vu,” she says, “only you know exactly where you’ve seen or heard or felt a thing before. You know every time, and place, and they sit stacked on top of each other like pages in a very long and complicated book.”
Henry shakes his head. “I would have lost my mind.”
“Oh, I did,” she says blithely. “But when you live long enough, even madness ends.”
“Here is a new kind of silence, rarer than the rest. The easy quiet of familiar spaces, of places that fill simply because you are not alone within them.”
“She never gets closure, never gets to say good-bye—no periods, or exclamations, just a lifetime of ellipses. Everyone else starts over, they get a blank page, but hers are full of text. People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it’s not a full fire, but Addie’s hands are full of candles. How is she supposed to set them down, or put them out? She has long run out of air.”
“Addie shakes her head. “I don’t understand. Why end their lives as they’re reaching their peak?”
He looks at her. “They made their deal. They knew the cost.”
“Why would anyone trade a lifetime of talent for a few years of glory?”
Luc’s smile darkens. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because vision weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades.” He leans close, twists a lock of her hair around one finger. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”
“And now that he’s up, he cannot bear the stillness. He is all restless energy, and urgent need, and there isn’t enough time, and he knows of course that there will never be.
That time always ends a second before you’re ready.
That life is the minutes you want minus one.”
“Do you know how you live three hundred years?” she says.
And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time.”
“Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet. But when you’re the only one holding on to an idea, a memory, a girl, it’s hard to keep it from floating away.”
“The world is wide, and he’s seen so little of it with his own eyes. He wants to travel, to take photos, listen to other people’s stories, maybe make some of his own. After all, life seems very long sometimes, but he knows it will go so fast, and he doesn’t want to miss a moment.”
“Addie has said so many hellos, but that was the first and only time she got to say good-bye. That kiss, like a piece of long-awaited punctuation. Not the em dash of an interrupted line, or the ellipsis of a quiet escape, but a period, a closed parenthesis, an end.
An end.
That is the thing about living in the present, and only the present, it is a run-on sentence. And Henry was a perfect pause in the story. A chance to catch her breath. She does not know if it was love, or simply a reprieve. If contentment can compete with passion, if warmth will ever be as strong as heat.”
Read: December 2020